Books: Masks of Genius

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: MAN OF THE CENTURY (969 pp.)Archibald
HendersonAppleton-Century-Crofts ($12).

Fifty-one years ago, Bernard Shaw found his Boswell in Archibald
Henderson, a stage-struck mathematics professor from the University of
North Carolina. In 1911 and 1932, Henderson produced "authorized"
biographies of Ireland's cranky genius. This book lacks the official
imprimatur, because it was completed after
Shaw's death, but it is the most massively, not to say crushingly,
definitive Shaw biography ever written.

A half-century of hero worship is not the best school for criticism. But
though Henderson's judgments on Shaw are uniformly gentle,...